Hi girls, just catching up over the past few days. So much to catch up on but first.
@MGC Bertie I am feeling such pain for you right now. I know if that were me I would be devastated and scared too. You have come so far and have this miracle baby you have to keep the faith. What did they say about this being a warning or a possibility? Do they hear success stories of a healthy foetus even with these levels? I am praying for you hon and hoping a this will be resolved for you as soon as possible. Hugs hugs hugs.
@Malak and @DeterminedOne I am in two minds whether to tell you this and now a little concerned myself about what procedure my husband had after reading what everyone has to say about whether tissue or tubules are taken away during mTESE.

But remember I mentioned my hubby was worried about one of his testies looking smaller following on from the mTESE in November. He went this week to have his observation with the Urologist after three months and his BT results for testosterone was perfect if anything slightly increased so that was good. Went to 11.7 up from 11.4 but his right testie is definitely smaller and that's because the doctor advised he had taken more tissue from that side.... He said it can happen that the testies get smaller following the op because in cases of severe azoospermia they need to take tissue whilst looking for plump tubules when exploring the Testie in the hope it contains sperm which they then give to the embryologists who take it away to see if they can find sperm immediately.

However if I read what @bbhope and @MGC Bertie are saying - no tissue should have been removed?! But that doesn't make sense to me because they have to remove some in order to search for sperms in what appears to plump tubules. Isn't that right?

@Jenniwithanl I am seriously confused that the moment after @bbhope mentioning 2 different mTESE. The Dr in Brisbane does microsurgical and not microdissection. So now I am confused to what is the correct one to get done and what the difference is *sigh*. This is really doing my head in.

Question time for you all ... are you doing private birth & checkups etc or public?

Ok, let's clarify. What Bertie and Jenni described are correct, it is like peeling the onion/orange and there are samples/tissues being taken out. Remember in my DH case, once they identified the tubules with 1 sperm, they sent that sample to lab and only then sperms were found after processing. The info that's missing here is that any skilled surgeon will not cut randomly and until no testicle left! Any urologist would have known better what effect it can be on a person without their testicles. @Malak, what your urologist was doing might just be purely trying to deter you from doing it. The whole point of mTESE is to be more accurately identifying the potential tubules, cutting out smaller sample size for a better success than TESE. That's another reason why my DH is against second mTESE -- he said "I still need my balls. They can't keep cutting." I don't blame him given all sort of complication one might have to go through. DrG advised us that it shouldn't affect him in any way because the sample size he collected was very small. In fact, my DH is fine, although he hasn't done any blood test. As a precaution, they do make them do hormone test 3 months after the surgery. That's what Jenni's husband did.

Again, @Malak, I strongly recommend you read the Cornell urologist and Silber descriptions on mTESE (micro-surgical and micro-dissection). I can't cut and paste them all here. You can even check out how they perform mTESE on youtube.

For the record, my DH just said he wouldn't change anything and doesn't care too much that is ball is a little smaller. We laugh that it's his war wound because he did everything he possibly could to have a biological child.

We asked Dr G when we went to him for a second opinion in Sydney why wasn't my hubby told to test his inhibin B back in Melbourne but it was after our failed TESA and he said it was pointless to do. I believe it depends on the results of the bloods initially but not all docs do it because they believe it doesn't explain much.

I would suggest anyone who is getting frustrated with docs - go and see Dr G in Syd. It was well worth the trip for us and as @bbhope said he referred us to Dr Katz back in Melbourne who had spent two years in NYC at Cornell so we had a good experienced surgeon do the job.

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